Friday, August 30, 2013

The 22nd edition of SI Fest - Savignano Immagini Festival will open in two weeks (September 13 - 15, 2013), with a wide selection of exhibitions curated by Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rössl, inspired by this year's theme Species of Spaces.

The various selected artists explore the idea of space in many directions: both as natural and artificial landscapes, but also looking at space as a private world; ultimately they also interrogate space as the element in which photographs can exist, as exhibitions, books and archives.

During the following weeks I will go through some of the artists involved in this year's edition, looking at the different ways they deal with the concept of space in their work. Lets start from one of the most imposing and problematic Species of Spaces presented in the festival, the urban landscapes of Roman Bezjak's Socialist Modernism – Archeology of an Era (book here) Made thanks to years of trips to several Eastern Europe countries, the work explores how socialist architecture still exist in their cities, buildings which are often marked by a strict functionalism and yet were conceived as monuments to an ideology. Bezjak's photographs often show them as objects fallen from the sky, disconnected by the urban landscape they dominate.

Bezjak's view reveal how the passing of time (and history) affected those buildings and how the surrounding space mutated around them through the decades. Socialist Modernism should be seen together with another recent work devoted to regime architecture, Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers, a documentation of the futuristic monuments in former Yugoslavia commissioned by Josip Tito to commemorate those fallen in World War II. The two projects seem like the two faces of the same utopia: monuments lost in space in one case, surreal shapes conceived with no physical constraints, while on the other hand we have buildings with a similar monumental ambition, but shaped by the space around them.